kept talking, but I’d stopped listening. My knuckles ached from grasping the table like the safety bar on a roller coaster. My stomach felt like it was on the same ride. Sweat dampened the back of my neck and prickled along my ribs.
This is a terrible idea. I fixed the sentence in my mind but couldn’t make myself say it. It was like someone had turned up the dial on my cognitive dissonance to eleven, until I was paralyzed between one option and another, right brain and left brain.
Only that wasn’t it, either. I knew what I wanted. I wanted my family to stay safe and under the radar. I didn’t want the McCullochs to sue Aunt Hyacinth for delaying the building of their bridge. I didn’t want them to make life so miserable for Aunt Hy that she couldn’t stay in the stone farmhouse with Uncle Burt. So where was this conflict in my brain coming from? Amy the eleven-year-old ghost hunter? Or Amaryllis the unmagical daughter of a magical family, suddenly unable to break Goodnight tradition?
Dammit, I was stronger than both of them. I took a breath, and a figurative leap, and blurted, “I think that’s a terrible idea.”
Everyone at the table looked at me. Hell, it felt like the whole bar looked at me, though a quick peek assured me the music and drinking and flirting continued without interruption.
So had the conversation in our scarred wooden booth. They’d been talking about something else entirely, and now they all stared at me like I’d lost my mind.
Way to stay under the radar, Amy.
Mark cleared his throat and leaned across the table, lowering his voice. “So, it’s not okay with you if Ben joins us? Because if it’s not, you’d better say so fast.”
I glanced around, found various expressions of amusement and disapproval from the gang, and Phin studying me, and Caitlin staring at me like some kind of insect. Freshmanicus tactlessicus.
When my gaze returned to Mark, he bit back a smile—a sympathetic one, but still—and pointed behind me.
12
i could not catch a break from Ben McCulloch. Even when he wasn’t personally giving me grief, the timing of his arrival made my awkward word-vomit even worse than it was.
Ben had spotted our table from across the bar and headed our way. He’d cleaned up, and it looked great on him. Not too neat, though. His dark blond—or light brown, I hadn’t decided—hair was mussed, his collared shirt un-tucked from his unpretentious jeans. Somewhere behind me, sounding far away, I heard Caitlin explaining that she’d invited him to join us, though she probably meant join her, and I didn’t think she’d be wrong, because when Ben McCulloch saw me his steps stuttered just a little before he continued through the jostling crowd.
Or maybe someone had stepped on his foot, I didn’t know.
I only knew that it was one thing too many. The roadhouse had filled up, and the buzz of voices joined the blare of music from the speakers pounding in my ears and splitting my head. The roller coaster hadn’t stopped, it had just taken a bone-jarring turn.
“I’m going to the restroom,” I said, and zipped out of the booth without meeting anyone’s eye, not caring—much—that Phin, crazy gadget and all, was looking like the picture of sanity compared to me.
The restrooms were on the other side of the bar. I should have skirted the edges of the room instead of going straight through the crowd in the middle, where the drinking and flirting was a little rowdy and the music was loud enough to drum out conscious thought. I ducked between two big guys who were both intent on a single girl, right as another guy turned, his hands full with two brimming plastic cups of beer.
I ran right into him. Or he ran into me. I was a little unclear on the details, except that we both tried to occupy the same space at the same time and I was suddenly drenched in beer.
A lot of beer. And the sign over the bar did not lie. That was some ice-cold draft.
The shock of it stilled the ping-ponging of my thoughts, at least. I think Beer Guy cursed, but nothing registered past the chill and the smell of hops and the drip of foam from my hair. A spot cleared in the crowd as people edged away from the swearing and the mess, staring at him, at me, and—oh hell—my soaked white T-shirt. Was I going to get